8 murders occurred near Dallas trails in 2022, police say. That’s not the whole story.

A fellow Dallas trails fanatic shared a shocking crime statistic as we recently left a Mountain Creek neighborhood meeting: Eight murders occurred last year on or very near the city’s steadily expanding hike-and-bike network.

That number couldn’t possibly be right. No way would public safety reporters miss a trend like that. It must be the stuff of Nextdoor exaggeration or social media hysteria.

Turns out the eight murders were part of a Dallas Police Department presentation that stated each occurred “within 100 feet of trails.”

That same slide, part of the March 7 “Pedestrian and Trail Safety” report to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, also listed 135 aggravated assaults and 61 robberies in 2022.

As a longtime runner and one of thousands of residents who regularly use the trail system — Dallas’ most amazing amenity — I needed to know more about those eight deaths.

What I learned left me feeling a little better about the chances of dying on the trails but concerned about DPD’s data tracking and its decision to include these eight deaths in the briefing.

The fact is only two of the eight took place in proximity to the city’s network of linear trails:

A 14-year-old was gunned down about 1 a.m. June 4 near the Old East Dallas Work Yard Park, which borders the Santa Fe Trail.

At Valley View Park, north of LBJ and west of North Central Expressway, an adult was stabbed to death about 5 p.m. June 23 in a parking lot adjacent to White Rock Creek Trail.

Three of the deaths were at or near parks that aren’t part of the hike-and-bike network: Central Square Park in Old East Dallas, Derrick L. Geter Park near the VA Medical Center in Oak Cliff and downtown’s Main Street Garden.

Dallas police spokeswoman Kristin Lowman said those made the list because the department considers even short paths and sidewalks within parks to be trails.

Also included was the high-profile shooting death of a child whose mother originally reported she was involved in a road rage incident near Forest Meadows Park in far northeast Dallas. Lacravivonne Washington has been charged with manslaughter in connection with her son’s shooting death.

The final two deaths on the list of eight also appear unrelated to any city park or trail. One was last April’s deadly shooting at a concert and trail ride on private property south of I-20.

“We tracked that as a trail because it was a trail ride,” Lowman said.

The other occurred in a neighborhood at 1600 Key Biscayne Drive, where I could find no park, although Lowman said the incident report stated “park parking lot.”

“That’s just the way that we track stuff,” Lowman said. “We’d rather over-report than under-report.”

How about just accurately reporting crimes and where they occur?

Permanently categorizing data based solely on the randomness of “trail” or “park” showing up in the first report is nonsensical.

DPD can argue until hell freezes over that its location tracking in these eight cases is defensible, but the end result was misleading to anyone who saw the numbers.

A much more honest accounting of the data was that two deaths were near hike-and-bike trails, which was the specific focus of the safety hearing.

As disheartened as I was with the data collection, the briefing as a whole wasn’t much better. The Park and Recreation Department and its many partners have a long way to go to convince this trail user a solid safety strategy is in place.

Count me with council member Adam McGough, chair of the Public Safety Committee, who challenged all the presenters and their departments to come back with specific next steps.

Calling the trails system “one of the real jewels of the city of Dallas,” he said, “we are not adequately addressing the safety as we are doing this.”

With budget town halls and internal discussions underway, McGough said, “I want y’all to raise the flag and say, ‘We’re not doing this good enough’ because I don’t believe we are.”

Safety has been top of mind with walkers, runners and bikers in recent months as seemingly random gunfire has multiplied on various trails across the city. Council members at the briefing recounted stories from their districts of volleys of automatic weapons and drunken fights on the trails.

Additionally, homeless encampments, bike-tire-destroying broken glass and illegal dumping have left trails such as Cottonwood, near North Central, almost unusable.

After a recent evening of gunfire on the Santa Fe Trail, DPD set up a camera near Lindsley Park, and more officers and park department rangers were deployed. But with current resources, curtailing the violence is mostly a game of whack-a-mole.

Like so many City Hall briefings, good intentions fell short of tangible action.

Details of new initiatives were bogged down by mind-numbing bureaucratese. Mumbo-jumbo like: Departments are working diligently, communicating and collaborating, leveraging funding and partnerships — all in pursuit of responding in the smartest way possible.

Assistant Park and Recreation Director M. Reneé Johnson did acknowledge needs such as cameras and lighting that are not yet funded. She said six park rangers now are certified on bikes and since February have been out on trails several times a week in two-member teams.

Assistant Chief Michael Igo said DPD focuses patrols on the most popular trails: White Rock Lake, the Katy, the Santa Fe and the AT&T and Trinity Forest trails.

The most encouraging part of the presentation came from Chief David Pughes, interim Dallas city marshal­. This office continues to expand its relatively new park unit to get more boots on the ground alongside the park rangers.

Toward the end of the briefing, John Jenkins, park department director, stepped up to the mic to say he would soon unveil a several-million-dollar budget request that would fund the latest safety technology, including drones and cameras.

Perhaps we’ll get those details when the trail safety briefing goes before the Dallas Park Board on April 20. Maybe DPD will also give its trail stats a good scrubbing before then.

Park Board chair Arun Agarwal, who early in his tenure created a subcommittee focused on safety, will be key to ensuring technology and enforcement measures worthy of the developing trail system.

Advocacy groups such as Friends of the Santa Fe Trail, Friends of Northaven Trail and the Dallas Trails Coalition know these stretches better than anyone. Yet they can’t provide law enforcement, nor can trail-building nonprofits such as The Loop Dallas.

Whether it’s eight deaths or two, that’s too many. The Dallas park department owns these trails and it must take the lead in making the system as safe as it is beautiful.